Arthur J. Gregg, his name replacing Lee’s on a Virginia fort, dies at 96

Arthur J. Gregg, the first African American Army officer to reach the rank of lieutenant general and the only person in modern history to have a military base named for him in his lifetime in his case a rechristening of a fort that had honored the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee died Aug. 22. He was 96. The Army announced the death on its website but did not cite a cause or say where he died. In April 2023, Fort Lee in Virginia was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams in honor of Gregg, who in 1977 became the Army’s first Black three-star general, and Lt. Col. Charity Adams Earley, who was the highest-ranking Black woman to serve as an Army officer in World War II. The new name was recommended by a congressional commission charged with rechristening nine military bases named for Confederate officers, as part of a national self-examination around race set off by the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Fort Lee, about 30 miles south of Richmond, near the confluence of the James and Appomattox rivers, had originally been named after Lee, one of eight Virginians who were West Point graduates and U.S. Army colonels at the outbreak of the Civil War. Among them, only Lee chose to take up arms against the United States, the commission noted.

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